I’ve been slowly editing audio and video for a release concert made for YouTube. Of course, I wanted to have these done ages ago, but the reality is that I am a slowpoke of a video/audio editor.
So here are the first two songs on Stolen Season, performed live in my little recording studio! Hope they make you smile. I included some trivia and tidbits in each video, as well.
You can listen to the album versions of these tracks for free if you like.
My intrepid crew and I are officially past the week one mark for the Sultry Summer Tour. Let me tell you, week one was a hell of a way to start things out. Two concerts obliterated by inclement weather, and very nearly a third. Having a port-a-potty service truck for a wakeup call the morning before a cross-country drive– those beasts are loud, by the way, and more so when you’ve got nothing but a thin tent wall protecting you from what sounds like unstoppable diesel death from above. Surviving a pretty significant campsite flood, and helping others to do the same. Making the most of compromised opportunities by letting the music carry us, just like it always does. We’ve definitely got some stories to tell after this week. Read on for more!
Today I am getting ready to leave my quiet forest nest to go and sing to the wide world again. I’ll be away from home, performing and making people happy, almost all the way from Litha to Mabon. It seems like such a long time.
I know many of you don’t get to be home for years at a stretch. You have my respect and my sympathies.
At the moment I’m facing down the mountain of things I must pack, and trying to laugh at the thought that my cats won’t remember what I look like by the time I return. 😉 They will. They’re far too smart to forget.
This is a big shift from the thought process of the girl who lived solid nomad-style for upwards of eight years. Having a house (and cats and plants and stuff) is weird. It changes your brain.
I hope that you’ve each got really fantastic plans for your summer– and I mean intentional plans, too, not just vacay– and that you can look forward to those plans as deeply as I’m looking forward to mine. Even though, just now, I’m nervous as hell.
Stolen Season continues to get a whole lotta love, more than I would ever have asked for. I am so grateful!
Here’s a quote from Andrew Greenhalgh at Breaking Down Sound:
The best of music transports listeners to a place that is colored with bold emotion and powerful imagery. These are the songs that connect you to a place in the past while looking into the future and that transport you to places exotic, foreign, and yet altogether very familiar. As she tucks into Mississippi Delta inspired blues and jazz tones, accenting them with warm hits of contemporary folk and a little something extra, longtime recording artist S.J. Tucker does just that, taking listeners on a musical journey that leads down through the muddy swamp and into the hazy smoke of the local jazz club.
Andrew is a regular and experienced writer of independent music (and it shows) whose goal is to write about artists who are worth hearing. Color me entirely flattered! Read his full review here. He makes me sound, and feel, like a big deal.
Then there’s James McQuiston’s review, which I also love, on NeuFutur Magazine’s website! Here’s a quote:
Black Swan Blues is a sultry track that works from a bluesy, soulful backdrop that is pushed into high gear with a call and response chorus. Sultry Summer Night looks back into the era of Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez, spinning their style into a bold new space with a piano line right out of mid-20th century Harlem.
Scuse me. I gotta go chase down my heart. It seems to have fluttered completely away. 🙂
Thank you, James! Thank you, Andrew! Thank you, CyberPR, for helping me secure such favorable acclaim for my little record!
– I have two concerts this weekend in St. Louis, starting tonight! Click here for the info!
Doors open at 6:30pm tonight, and my free show in Tower Grove Par tomorrow, at St. Louis Pagan Picnic is at noon.
-Wyldwood Radio has a few hours left on their fundraiser! They’re hoping to raise funds for equipment that will allow them to go to more witchy events and interview more of your favorite witchy performers, like me. There’s a compilation disc among the perks that a whole bunch of us have contributed to. Check it out below.
Lots going on this month!
-I’ll be in St. Louis starting June 5 (that’s tomorrow), doing a big evening show with Brian “Boo” Greenway, Raw Earth, and Tuatha Dea! That’s this Friday, 7pm at The Focal Point.
–St. Louis Pagan Picnic is this weekend! It’s a free event in Tower Grove Park, which is a pretty nifty place. I’m on stage at noon on Saturday, sandwiched between two dance performances (see my complaining face? BRING ME THE SHIMMY). Here’s the full performance schedule. This is a free, outdoor event. Concerts, workshops, rituals and drum circles are all planned, and a whole bunch of talented vendors will be there, selling their wares! That includes yours truly. The weather’s gonna be great. It’s free. You should come. 🙂
-My big summer tour starts in a few days with Pagan Spirit Gathering in Illinois, and also Free Spirit Gathering in Maryland! After that, I’m bringing Tricky Pixie to New York Faerie Fest for the first time! It’s all on my tour schedule page.
Festival season has always been a good time for me, and I’m thrilled to have some many festival events scheduled for this month. Hope to see you along the way!
NOTE: I’m working on setting a few little shows up for July, hopefully in Chicago, MSP, and Missoula, MT. I’ll post when those are settled in, but I may opt to wait until Mercury goes direct again next week. 😛
Some of this week’s entertainers:
Chris Orapello is one of my favorite podcast hosts. I also consider him a friend. He’s great to talk with about all things occult and witchy, as well as music and other inspiring stuff. Chris invited me back onto his Down at the Crossroads podcast recently, and he’s just posted the episode that includes our chat! He says I broke his brain a bit by the end of the session. I promise I didn’t mean to! 🙂 We did go pretty deep, talking about everything from my Stolen Season album, to Ginger Doss‘s music, to how to interact respectfully with the genius loci of any given place. It was time and energy well spent.
Chris has a great sense of how to put a playlist together, and so the episode also includes some really wonderful music. Download it directly here if you like, or visit the podcast website here to explore further. Again, it’ll be time well spent.
My friend Rob Carlos, illustrator and magic-maker, has super powers. He sees dragons, and knows how to draw them. He has a knack for showing the people he knows how cool they actually are, in his eyes. Basically, he can do anything he sets his mind to with the power of paper and paint, pen and pencil. Yesterday he turned my sweetheart and me into X-Men, just because he could. I would never have seen this coming, but wow, am I impressed and tickled and giddy and grateful!
…I also want to know how he figured out that these two are my favorites among all the X-Men ever, without our ever having discussed this particular fandom. 🙂 Sorcery, I tell you.
Check out his work here. He’s fabulous.
Ryan as Gambit, S. J. as Rogue by Rob Carlos
Betsy, Ryan and I all headed home this past Tuesday afternoon. Some people are under the illusion that musician-types just sort of loaf around when they’re not touring and performing, but that’s certainly not true for the three of us! If you know what it’s like to come home and do laundry (for days) after two festival weeks in a row, you know what I’m talking about. 🙂
Aside from laundry, I’ve been composing and submitting new tracks for the video game soundtrack I’m working on. Have you seen Dragon the game? It’s early access, which means you can play as the game develops! Be a dragon and fly around doing stuff? Yes please! This week I wrote a new piece of “flying around and exploring” music, which our game director told me he wants to put in to the game itself “as soon as possible.” I guess this means all those times as a kid (and not as a kid) pretending to be a dragon and wishing I could fly have actually paid off in my professional life! HaHA! Take that!
I also have some vocal tracks to record for Sharon Knight and Winter, to be added to a couple of songs on their upcoming Portals project. Both of the songs Sharon has asked me to contribute to are pieces we’ve done on stage together before. I’m honored that Sharon and Winter liked my seat-of-pants harmony choices enough to ask me to make them part of the “official” versions of these songs!
My songwriting prompt for my song-a-week group this week is “right or wrong”. Up to this point, I’ve gotten an idea for my weekly new song pretty quickly after learning the prompt. Not so this week. I think I have the glimmer of a beginning today, though, inspired by how wild the weather and seismic activity has been on the planet of late. Did I mention that the Arkansas River, about five miles from my house, is well past its thirty-foot flood stage right now? It’s snuggled up to its levees like I snuggle up with my sweetheart on movie night. So: The river doesn’t hold with right or wrong… That’s where my new song has begun. We’ll see where it goes.
The online PR campaign for Stolen Season continues apace, as well. I’m still soliciting new reviews and interviews, and I’m still largely pleased with the reception the album has had so far. Thank you all for listening and enjoying it! I have not yet posted my planned CD release concert vids for YouTube, but I have not forgotten about them. The trouble is convincing myself that the video performances I have for each song are good enough for y’all. Remember my post about holding onto what your loved ones say when they tell you that you’re awesome? Why is that so hard? 🙂
I hope everyone who reads this is faring well, worldwide, with all of the recent natural disasters. Earthquakes in Nepal, flooding from Houston to Oklahoma, drought in California; I am doing my best to keep aware of it all and to keep all of you in my thoughts. Please stay safe. The beauty doesn’t always balance the rough stuff, but I offer it anyway. In song, in image, in heart.
Believe it or not, it’s pretty rare for someone to give me an album review that includes any sort of constructive criticism and feedback. The first time it happened, the reviewer was a friend of mine, and he was worried I’d be so offended by his (very useful and not at all nasty) criticism that we wouldn’t be friends anymore. I reassured him very quickly that I could take it, and it actually is a thing I can appreciate. If people who like what you do don’t point out the things that would get them to like what you do even more, how you gonna grow?
Mind you, I love the hell out of any glowing praise I get. But Heath Andrews gives me more than that in his recent review. It’s clear to me that he really took the time to listen critically to Stolen Season, and I’m grateful to him for it! In spite of the things he found to be not quite as good as they could have been (lengthwise and mood-wise, primarily), he STILL gives the album 4.5 out of 5 stars, gives me all sorts of mixing and song treatment compliments, and states that the album “does this genre well and it does this genre proud,” meaning my interpretation of Southern Blues. Hardcore fans of mine may take exception to a couple of his statements, but me? I’m taking it all as input that I can really use.
Thank you so very much, Heath, for taking the time. 🙂
Read the full review here and check out the rest of his reviews on Tumblr while you’re at it. Good stuff from somebody who really listens.